Word: byronism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cecil's Young Melbourne. Perhaps the most valuable which the English, despite their paper shortage, had the civilized perspicacity to print-was E. M. Butler's Rainer Maria Rilke ($4.50), the first full-length study of a great German poet. Others were Peter Quennell's arch Byron in Italy ($3.50) and Arthur Hobson Quinn's heavy, thorough Edgar Allan Poe ($5). Garrett Mattingly's Catherine of Aragon ($3.50) and Kenneth Allott's smart Jules Verne...
Pushkin, who wanted to be a Byron and died in a bourgeois duel, uncovered Russia's deepest melancholy in Boris Godunov, its worst superficialities in Eugene One gin. Tolstoy need not have written the great length of War & Peace to portray the best Russia; his typical common Russian, the soldier Karatasv, stands "an unfathomable, rounded-off and everlasting personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth." Glinka's Ruslan and Liudmila sang the gay folk tunes; Tchaikovsky's Pathetique caught in single chords all the national sadness...
Life in Pisa was seldom dull. Sometimes Shelley saw visions. He alarmed one friend by pointing to the sea one day and saying: "There it is again-there!" He said he saw "a naked child," Byron's dead daughter, Allegra, "rise from the sea and clap its hands as in joy. . . ." Once in an absent-minded moment he "glided" stark naked through the room where his wife was entertaining friends...
When the sailing fad set in, Shelley and his friend Williams went tacking and tipping up & down the coast. One day their horribly waterlogged, fish-eaten bodies were brought ashore and buried. Then they were dug up for cremation on the beach. "Is that a human body?" asked Byron. "Why, it's more like the carcass of a sheep." Shelley's brains, "cupped in the broken cranium," seethed and boiled as in a cauldron for a long time. Byron felt sick, went for a swim. Driving home, Byron and Leigh Hunt felt a "hysterical gaiety . . . drank...
Shocked by Shelley's death, bored by Teresa Guiccioli, worn out by living with the Leigh Hunts (whose very modern children Byron called a "draal of Hottentots") Byron decided to go to Greece. Author Quennell does not believe that he really wanted to go. "The idea of death might leave him calm; he shuddered . . . at the prospect of moving house." To Lord and Lady Blessington who saw him just before he left, he made farewell presents, demanded "a corresponding gage d'amitie." He made "some sarcastic observation on his nervousness." He had wept "and made no effort...